With the beginning of the year 2000, CWIN
has completed 13 years of action in the area of the rights
of the child in Nepal. During this period, the message of
CWIN for the rights of the child has emerged as a national
concern in this country. Established as a small local group,
CWIN has now stood-up as a national child rights organisation
with a significant national and international recognition.
If we review the role of CWIN in the national child rights
movement, one of its major contribution has been to convert
the non-issue of children into a public agenda. Besides,
its direct involvement in the liberation of children from
exploitation and slavery like condition is another major
event undertaken by CWIN. From the very inception, the message
of CWIN was very clear that working for children is not
just a mere charity, its an action for social change. The
last 13 years, particularly the period of last 10 years
after the introduction of UN Convention on the Rights of
the Children (UN-CRC) has been a very significant time for
the child rights movement in Nepal. There is perhaps no
such issue and event concerning children in this country
where CWIN’s involvement was absent. However, it is
fact that all these achievements were materialised with
the active co-operation of other like-minded organisations
working in this field.
The beginning of the year 2000 was a rewarding
moment for CWIN. UNICEF, in The State of World’s Children,
2000, globally recognised and honoured CWIN as one of
the world’s leaders working for the best interest of
children, while announcing the name of 52 personalities
of the world. CWIN has received hundreds of congratulatory
messages from different parts of the world including other
hundreds of people from home. CWIN feels a great honour
for this recognition and extends its heartfelt thanks to
all the friends and well-wishers for sharing this pleasant
moment with CWIN.
As in past years, CWIN’s one of the
major works were concentrated in advocacy action. In this
context, CWIN organised some important activities such as
election campaign on the rights of children, celebration
of the 10th anniversary of UN-CRC with public programmes,
lobbying and pressure works against child sex abuse and
paedophiles followed by legal action for the
protection of the rights of victimised children. Similarly,
CWIN’s advocacy programme was also focussed in the
adoption of the ILO’s Convention for the Elimination
of the Worst Forms of Child Labour, lobbying for
the adoption of child labour bill in the parliament,
and focussed discussion on the role of education for
the reduction of burden of child labour. As a part of the
broader human rights movement in Nepal, CWIN actively participated
in the fact finding mission about several incidents of CPN(Maoist)
initiated Janayuddha, pressure programmes for the formation
of already announced “Human Rights Commission”,
formation of Alliance for Human Rights and Social Justice
(ALLIANCE).
In 1999, CWIN’s information works
were mainly concentrated in the collection of information
about what is happening in Nepal in relation to the rights
of the child. Collected information were disseminated to
different focus groups through press release, press meeting,
regular publications of CWIN and by writing articles in
different newspapers and magazines. CWIN Information and
Resource Centre has a collection of all related information
on children where different people and organisations are
receiving information either through mail, email or by visiting
the Centre. This year, CWIN also updated the CWIN Home
Page for about four times and introduced e-list. CWIN
has been easily reached by anybody in the world who has
got the internet access.
Opening of elist on clabour for
sharing and discussion on the issue of child labour was
also a new beginning of this year. Similarly, CWIN’s
access to the internet also helped strengthen the capacity
of the resource centre to get more information in different
issues related to the rights of children. The regular publication
of CWIN such as the “Voice of Child Workers”
in English and “Baal Sarokar” in Nepali
of course contributed in widening views and vision of people
working in the area of the rights of the child. Similarly,
messages, press release and leaflets published in different
occasions also helped maintain the CWIN’s role as
the watch dog of the rights of the child.
Working “for children, with children”
is a philosophy of CWIN. If you want to contribute something
for the rights of children you need to understand and internalise
a real situation and problem of children. This can’t
be done without working with children. In order to materialise
this conception into action, CWIN has been undertaking a
number of community programmes which ultimately delivers
services for the promotion, protection and social re-integration
of children at risk. At present, CWIN’s community
programmes consist of help line service, socialisation
service, night shelter for street children, transit houses
for girl children and boy children, health centre and counseling
service, contact centre at the central bus terminal, educational
support and sponsorship and student’s hostel. Besides,
emergency services such as ambulance services and hot-line
telephone service are also available at CWIN. With these
services, CWIN extended necessary support for 11,135 children
in need in 1999. As for the emergency help, CWIN Health
Clinic extended support to 6532 cases likewise the CWIN
Help-line did to 2716 children. For the emergency relief
and shelter, CWIN Socialisation Centre helped 521 children,
CWIN Balika provided residential care and rehabilitation
support to 73 girl children, CWIN Centre for Children at
Risk for 242 children, CWIN Pokhara to 150 children, CWIN
Hostel to 31 children, CWIN Centre for Self Reliance to
151 children for skill education, CWIN ESP to 719 children
for school educational support. Opening of blood bank
for children at risk with the co-operation of Blood
Bank of Nepal Red Cross Society was another important event
of CWIN for the benefit of children at risk this year.
Children’s right to participation
was one of the major focus of the rights of the child movement
in Nepal this year. On the one hand, we worked for conceptual
clarity of the children’s participation through the
child consortium process, whereas on the other we
helped build-up a pressure movement for formal recognition
of the children’s right to organisation for
their interest. A case was filed in the district court of
Kathmandu in this regard and is waiting for the final verdict
of the supreme court of Nepal. At the same time, CWIN has
been closely working with the child rights forums in
different parts of the country. There are altogether 242
child rights forums which were facilitated by CWIN. During
formation of child rights forum in different parts of the
country, CWIN provided training facilities for 094 child
organisers and 115 teachers as facilitators. Children’s
participation in the school extra-curricular activities
and community works were appreciable.
Institutional building work is
basically a process, which should go hand-in-hand with other
development process. One of the general remarks of the Nepal’s
social development work is the poor quality of institutional
building process. In this context, if we look at CWIN’s
performance in the area of institutional building work,
we can say that CWIN has been effective in some extent.
CWIN has improved its quality of performance in information
system, public relations, human resources development, management
and accounting. However, we identified a number of areas
where CWIN needs to improve its quality of work for a making
a better institution. This year, CWIN successfully installed
the computer networking system at CWIN and staff
were trained for handling the computer programme in their
respective departments. All the CWIN centres were slowly
equipped with the modern information technology for
data collection and record keeping works. Likewise, CWIN
staff were also trained in the areas of residential care
techniques, counseling, child rights programme, organisational
management, first aid service, child participation approach,
conceptual clarity of gender, trafficking in children, child
labour and etc. . Similarly, CWIN was very much involved
in helping other orgnisations including HMG/Agencies for
their institutional building works.
As a part of the broader networking
system in the areas of the rights of children, human
rights and trafficking in women, child labour, street children
and so on, CWIN extended its relation and scope of works
with more organisations both within the country and outside.
CWIN was one of the founding member of “alliance for
human rights and social justice” (ALLIANCE) which was
formed this year. Similarly, Its active involvement in AATWIN,
NGOs Federation, Global March against Child Labour helped
strengthen the alliances in these areas.
As usual, CWIN published a quarterly and
annual report on the state rights of children in
Nepal in the basis of news survey, research findings and
records at the CWIN Help-line and other agencies. The report
is based on the fundamental principles of UN-CRC.
